The Global Consciousness Project
Posted by daydreamer at 17:18, 17 May 2009Hay all,
I've come across the Global Consciousness Project recently. Reading the website reminds me a little of being back at uni; its a headache, but a nice one. Feels like i need to print the site out and sit down with a coffee really.
I like the idea of the Global Consciousness Project. The use of random number generators is interesting.
In another blog post a member pointed me towards data showing an electromagnetic increase around the time of 9/11. Unfortunately i couldnt find any reference to it. If anyone has a link i would appreciate it (especially to any data). The trouble i have with using satellites to measure electromagnetism is that i'm not sure you wouldnt expect an electromagnetic increase then anyway. All those phones going crazy, tv's going on, power stations having to turn themselves up to meet demand etc. We are electromagnetic anyway so i dont know what it would show if an increase was measured that wasnt related to electronics (one very sensitive and confirmed as human activity). Perhaps like measuring an increase in heat in a room when a lion is released in a crowd of people, i dont think it could necessarily be used as an example of directly measuring consciousness even though it might be related to an increase in 'conscious activity', and especially not to claim that consciousness is 'quantum heat'!
Using random number generators is a fine way of getting around these problems. If what they are suggesting is true then i would be pretty gobsmacked. At the moment i am very suspicious though.
As you know, i would class myself as a natural/material atheist. I think quantum consciousness is a nice way of bringing 'new age' ideas into an accessible form to me. From the way many people talk you would think that the quantum world is immaterial, which obviously it isnt. It is funky, but we already knew the world was. To me bringing ideas of the soul into a quantum world is almost a way of taming them. I can also see how quantum consciousness isnt the savior of religious/spiritual folk either. There really isnt much difference from a naturalistic perspective between consciousness occurring naturally in the universe through evolution of the brains macroscopic neural structure and quantum consciousness occurring naturally in the universe through evolution of the brain and macroscopic neural structure. Especially since most spiritual adherents of quantum consciousness almost seem to consciously ignore the fact that macroscopic neural structure plays the most significant role in consciousness, preferring some sort of symbiotic theory rather than the quantum just being an aspect of consciousness, which is what i would suggest the best quantum evidence (ahem ;-) ) suggests.
I am not really including NDE's etc as evidence of quantum consciousness there as it isnt directly evidence of any particular scientific idea, rather evidence of experience after death etc.
Anyway i was wondering what people thought of the GCP, in particular about how people have disagreed with it.
One thought i have had is that there seems quite a tendency to think that any change in randomness is due to human consciousness. As far as bio-matter is concerned us vertebrates represent a small percentage. In fact most of the biosphere consists of organisms we cant even see with the naked eye.
What might make people think that a project at Princeton is confirming that animals/plants/microbes dont have consciousness. Especially where large earthquakes/tsunami's are concerned. Per number of conscious beings surely humans are in the minority of affected animals (ignoring plants and microbes for that argument).
On the other side of things some events (almost) wholly affect the human world, such as the New Year parties or prayer days etc. These have created probability events; so is this to be taken as evidence that our consciousness really is more important than that of the animal world.
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29 March 2005
49 weeks 4 days
http://www.lfr.org/LFR/csl/library/Sep11...
10 August 2004
6 hours 48 min
Daydreamer - something about the electromagnetic effect around 9/11 came up in another blog not so long ago and The Floppy 1 posted some comments including, I think, specifics of the satellites which did the picking up of the effect. Check out Floppy's comments and see if you can locate it. Or, use the TDG search box on the subject of electromagnetism - might produce something.
Regards, Kathrinn
12 April 2007
38 min 36 sec
I read about this in a Spanish magazine. I was under the impression that the spike registered on 9/11 was before the first plane crashed with the WTC?
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
21 January 2005
6 min 8 sec
Personally, I don't think it's a matter of humans being more important or influential than animals or plants, but rather of focused intention. If there were some kind of mass tragedy involving the animal or plant kingdom exclusively (say, a sudden mass extermination), I suspect this, too, would register as a spike--but I can't think of any event that would single out animals or plants so exclusively like that (unlike 9/11, which involved only humans). BTW--look up the work of Cleve Backster; controversial, but still suggestive.
18 May 2009
2 years 36 weeks
Although studies of the quantum world are definitely shifting a lot of perspectives these days, and I will admit, my mind is largely boggled by all these new developments, especially since most of these are, compared to classical physics, exponentially more difficult to grasp mentally, I'm still very skeptic about projects like this.
I find the entire framework of this project a bit more like wishful thinking or if you wish, a typical examples of the relentless search for patterns of the human brain.
I sadly however do not see the necessary correlation between events that affect or involve human consciousness and changes or deviations in randomly collected data as the researchers obviously do. From what I've seen this research is based on various experiments that have taken place along time involving targeted changes in random events via human consciousness.
I would see a point to this theory when considering targeted consciousness, but the general state of mind/consciousness of the human race is not targeted, it is in it's vast majority, target-less.
More so, I fail to see why human consciousness would play a more significant role in the altering of randomly collected data than other events, whether they are of animal, plant or other physical nature.
The random number sequences they are generating are produced using electronic equipment, that gathers this randomness from various sources, however they are all invariably physical, thus connected to and part of not just to people, or plants, or Aardvarks, but to the entire universe.
It seems like a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions are being made in this research and I would bet that their data also shows a pretty constant stream of "deviances", except some of them can be willingly associated with various events that affect the human strata of our corner of the multiverse, while the remaining cannot.
More so, there are a lot of events on their hitlist that I would consider pretty insignificant, and more strangely a lot of events that aren't there, which were considerably more significant. I mean.. Palin's acceptance speech really doesn't strike me as the kind of event that would spike global consciousness. What number of minds does an event need to reach to register? 100 000, 1 000 000?
And then there's the really silly stuff, like trying to correlate their data with astrological predictions. Come on. If this was real science they wouldn't be bothering with that nonsense and would be focusing on some actual research.
Maybe they are finding something. but I doubt it's what they think they are.
21 January 2005
6 min 8 sec
Have you read "The Conscious Universe" by Dean Radin (versus read summaries of it, or, read about it)?
18 May 2009
2 years 36 weeks
No, I have not, but regardless of whether it is a book worth reading or not on it's own, I doubt it would constitute itself as an answer to why randomly generated number sequences would be influenced solely by human thought, which what my main question re: these experiments was.
Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll add it to my Amazon wishlist.
21 January 2005
6 min 8 sec
I mistakenly posted my response to your earlier entry higher up than I realized, so it may have gone unnoticed--at any rate, I'll re-post it again here:
"Personally, I don't think it's a matter of humans being more important or influential than animals or plants, but rather of focused intention. If there were some kind of mass tragedy involving the animal or plant kingdom exclusively (say, a sudden mass extermination), I suspect this, too, would register as a spike--but I can't think of any event that would single out animals or plants so exclusively like that (unlike 9/11, which involved only humans). BTW--look up the work of Cleve Backster; controversial, but still suggestive."
p.s. I'll add this: if an atom bomb were dropped on an area of the Amazon jungle where no humans lived, say, it would be a good test of whether or not the random number generators responded to non-human consciousness as well.
18 May 2009
2 years 36 weeks
Hmm, well understood, but as I said, targeted response is one thing and generalized response is another.
For example trying to influence a coin to land tails-up, is targeted response. You are willing a situation to change by though.
Seeing people being stranded in a flood however does not elicit a targeted response, so even though your consciousness is reacting in one manner or another to the events, you are not actively directing your thoughts towards it, merely reacting, which I would believe, if any of this were true, would generate a much less significant "disturbance in the force" if there were such a thing.
More so, a lot of the examples in this experiment are rather minute events, involving a small number of deaths, if we are to take this example. Otherwise put, if what you say is true, I should elicit a bigger "response" by stepping on an ant colony then they got from say the Kursk, or one of the bombing events whose death toll in all was rater small.
Also, a lot like dealing with astrology, there comes the question of physics, and how exactly such a phenomena, if it were involving only humans, would take place. Would we see the same "deviations" if we placed the devices on the moon? What about if we placed them on a probe sent out of the solar system?
If you raise the idea that human consciousness is the only thing generating what they claim to be seeing, then that means for some reason only WE are able to create this response, and then comes the question WHY. That would mean we are special in some way, and sadly I must say I totally disagree with that notion.
IMHO this looks too little like science and far too much like attempting to find superpowers in humanity. Also, I would at least be more interested if they would setup some decent experiments to try and get "deviances" in a multitude of environments and situations and sources, and then draw conclusions, if any, instead of playing a game of match the deviance with world events, allthewhie skipping a lot of them, and most probably skipping a lot of the deviances as well.
1 May 2004
2 days 6 hours
..that we do emit our thoughts out and these thoughts have an effect on our reality. It's threw observation that I make this assumtion.
You may like to read this blog and comments from a few years back. Some very interesting ideas in that lot.
"Life can be whatever you want it to be, as long as you do what your told."
LRF.
18 May 2009
2 years 36 weeks
Well of course, thoughts are basically electricity so they do have an effect in/on reality, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
However the measure of their effect is something that is yet completely unproven, and quite likely, because of the bias that this field of research has brought upon itself in part, will not be for a while, IF bigger effects do indeed exist.
Oh and sorry to say this but most of the talk in that blog thread is metaphysics and wishful thinking at best. I want science not opinions. My opinion is that extraterrestrial life does exist, unfortunately that doesn't make it so.
1 May 2004
1 year 15 weeks
Regardless of opinions, and regardless of terrestrial science and speculation as well.
The problem with science down here is that it is an experimental process, like the mind that supports it.
Were the mind put into a real state, science would be real as well.
I am not saying that science is useless but rather that it is limited to the field of knowledge, which is to say the least rather small on this planet.
Yet, science always has the impression of being on top of things, simply because it sits at the edge of knowledge.
It is a relativistic impression that negates the unknown, since the unknown cannot be measured by a science that is based on experience.
This means that ultimately speaking, metaphysics have as much, if not more, chances of describing reality, because metaphysics don't necessarily exclude science as opposed to science that excludes everything it does not measure.
Science, as we know it, is a tool of development and not a law. Its limitation is always in the mind that makes use of the tool.
So, unless individuals truly change, science will remain limited, regardless of scientific pride, very much like spiritual pride never was an opening on reality.
21 January 2005
6 min 8 sec
With all due respects, ealex, you really need to do your homework before you make comments like this, since most of your concerns are already addressed with much of the current research.
21 February 2009
1 day 5 hours
Hi Jupiter,
Can you point me in the direction of the research please. Anything to get me started on the available data.
Much Thanks
Daydreamer